Monet Software

Call Center Scheduling Feature Article

How Real-time Alerts Benefit the Contact Center

While most contact centers monitor their operations to some degree, not all monitoring is created equal. Not too long ago, monitoring was done on only a portion of the call center’s operations, and many times, managers had to wait days, weeks or even months to see reports that contained the relevant intelligence.

Fast forward a decade or so, and the most cutting-edge call centers monitor far more of their operations. They also monitor and provide managers with feedback in real time, which can make a great deal of difference to operations. Managers and supervisors can receive alerts if agents or teams are out of adherence or have a different status than what they should. Getting these notifications in real-time allows call center decision makers to make changes that have an immediate impact on the call center performance. The faster a manager can react, the easier it is to achieve and maintain targeted service levels, wrote workforce optimization solutions provider Monet Software in a recent blog post.

With many of today’s workforce optimization solutions, call centers can monitor various activities and set up customizable exceptions, then receive notifications (also customizable) when something goes wrong. This allows managers to define custom states and exceptions that are aligned with the call center’s requirements. When these custom states are out of whack, call center management can choose to receive pop-ups, email or text message alerts based on thresholds they set.

These thresholds may represent a number of scenarios: agents or teams not adhering to their set schedules, agents returning late from breaks or lunch, call durations lasting too-long, overly long hold times or even agents forgetting to manually log out at the end of their shifts (a common problem in call centers today).

With real-time alerts, companies can continually finessing their operations, spotting problems before they begin and have a better understanding on how to improve processes to stay on target with call center goals. The end result, of course, is more efficient operations and higher customer satisfaction.